Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Every day before lunch, I go for a short
walk along the creek, down to the bridge. Even on a cold, soggy day like today, I know
it will be beautiful. There are the bare
branches all tangled against the sky, the muted orange and gold of the fallen
leaves giving a crinkly texture to the ground, and the raindrops forming
perfect concentric circles in the water.

And I see a lot of squirrels, looking
pretty fat and healthy, and busily ferrying nuts around. They don’t seem unduly anxious about the
coming winter. They have a plan, the
same one they’ve had in past years, and it hasn’t failed them yet.

How are we humans doing? Do we have a plan? Today in Paris, leaders from all over the
globe are meeting to discuss saving the planet for future generations. This is a new thing, earthlings working
together, attempting to use collective knowledge for the collective good on
such a large scale. But clearly we have
to change our approach in a very basic way, partnering with the planet instead
of competing against natural forces.

At this moment in history, most of us
are a little lost. We are passive,
disconnected to our own power and agency.
Unlike the squirrels, we don’t have a clear connection between our day-to-day
activities and the things we truly need to survive.

We are all quite dependent on machines
and technology which we don’t fully understand.
Many of us spend all day working at jobs which do not directly contribute
to anyone’s well-being. Some people
create useful objects, but often do it in unhealthy, dehumanizing
environments.

And here in the US, a great deal of
money and energy is dedicated to turning us into consumers, those who buy great
quantities of stuff. And as we buy
things, we know that these objects are made cheaply, designed to fall apart as
soon as possible, so that we will buy the same objects again. In other words, even as consumers, we are not
respected enough to be offered real value.

All of this is bad for us and bad for
the earth. To survive on this planet, we’ll
have to give up these mindless activities, along with all the garbage they
produce. It seems clear, looking around
at the things the earth makes, that beauty and harmony are her choices in most
situations. If we learn to live in
harmony with her, it will be because we echo her creativity, ingenuity, and
style.

Ambiguity, uncertainty and passivity
relate to the planet Neptune. And addiction
is also a Neptunian thing. When you don’t
have a sense of power, you just reach for whatever feels the best, because it
doesn’t much matter what you do. When
you’re not grounded on the earth or in your skin, then the best choice is to
find an overpowering sensation and let it take you over. And our society provides many choices of
addiction, one to suit every personality.

Right now, Neptune is strong in its home
sign, Pisces, and it’s making a hard aspect to Saturn. Saturn is the planet of limitation and
scarcity, so this mix produces fear. There’s
an ongoing sense of threat, but no clear sense of its origins. Our passivity feels wrong, but there’s still
no clear signal for action.

The attacks in Paris generated a lot of
fear; they were felt as an electric shock here in the US. Fear has been used as a cynical campaign tool
for quite a while, but this approach has been escalating with the candidacy of
Donald Trump, who is the master of social scapegoating. Feel powerless? It’s their fault, whoever “they” are. And, in the twisted logic of a bully, these
scapegoats are both capable of terrible things, and at the same time, weaklings
and “losers”.

This incendiary speechifying has
resulted in a spate of domestic terrorism, such as the recent shootings at the
Minneapolis Black Lives Matter rally, and the attacks on Planned Parenthood. Fear makes people attack anyone who seems
alien in any way, even if that person is an orphan child coming from a war
zone.

These issues will be with us for a while,
although the Saturn/Neptune square will weaken as December goes on. But this is just the first pass of an aspect
which will be a big player in 2016. It
will return in the spring, and be in orb for about five months. So we will have a lot of opportunities to
work on this question of amorphous fear.
We will have to identify these terrifying figures in the mist, and that
means coming closer to them. It can mean
stripping off their masks and seeing someone you thought you loved, or perhaps seeing
yourself.

During hard Neptune aspects, you have to
find a way to move through the fog, towards whatever light you can spot. The Paris talks are a beacon, although we
still don’t know if they’ll succeed in any real sense. Is the world too far gone? Have we destroyed ourselves already?

Neptune is not just the planet of
confusion and ambivalence. When we’re driven
crazy by illusions and deceptions, we go inward, and so Neptune leads us to the
still small voice of truth within. This
is our connection to the cosmos, which is both inside us and around us. Neptune dissolves ego barriers, sometimes
painfully, and puts us in touch with a greater consciousness.

And Saturn is the voice of experience,
telling us what hasn’t worked in the past.
Facing that can be flattening, but it’s a necessary first step to living
more fully and wisely on this planet. We
can work together to build lives that are healthy, grounded, and
accountable. Some of us are doing this,
without any sense of certainty, with just enough faith to keep on. But some of us can’t find that, and are just
howling in the wind.